Saturday, November 1, 2014

Queers w/o Borders: 014 UCLA Queer Graduate Student Conference

“Queers
w/o Borders,” this year’s QGrad Conference, was kicked off with opening remarks
from Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chair of LGBT Studies and Professor in the Departments
of Chicana and Chicano Studies, English, and Gender Studies. Instead of
addressing her remarks to “Ladies and Gentlemen,” she greeted “Lesbians, Gays, Queers, Allies,
Transgender, and Those with Variations of Fluid Identities.” After thanking all
the people who helped the conference come to fruition, she posed this question:
“Can we exist without borders?” Whether we like it or not, borders have become
a crucial part of our lives. Power, however, comes from navigating between and
outside such borders (hence the title of the conference). I attended two of the
sessions: “Cultural Representations of Queer Lives” and “Cross-cultural and
International Exchanges.”

Cultural Representations
of Queer Lives

This panel featured “The Amercanized
Queer of Historical Television,” Britta Hans, USC; “Does Emotion Matter? An
Examination of Affect in Queer Social Protest,” Eric Baldwinn, UCI, and “From
Intimate Expressions to International Publication: the Poetry of Marcel Proust,”
Louise Brown, UCLA. Sue-Ellen Case, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Ph.D.
Program in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA, was the moderator. Hans
argued that even in historical television shows that are located in Europe (for
instance The Borgias and Spartacus), queer characters conform to contemporary
American queer stereotypes. The shows only depict queers to the extent that the
audience will be comfortable watching and hence resort to ahistorical and
stereotypical methods of depiction. Baldwinn’s presentation explored records on
social movements and suggested that even though popular assumption is that emotions
play a big role in mobilization of social movement, emotions actually play no
role in the actual mobilization. It is likely, he argued, that only after successfully
carrying out the movement’s goals to mobilize citizens that emotions come into
play in the formation of a narrative of mobilization. Lastly, Brown explored
the poetry of Marcel Proust, which was written when he was an adolescent boy. Suggesting
that the use of obscurity was a tactic that Proust deployed, Brown suggested
that such a method could also be incorporated into social interactions to
garner more diverse methods of exchange among queer folks.

Cross-cultural and
International Exchanges

Paola Concia

Moderated
by Laure Murat, Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies
at UCLA, this panel featured “Locating the Filipina Lesbian: Navigating Spaces
of Inclusion and Exclusion in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Centers in the
Philippines,” Mylene DeGuzman, University of the Philippines-Diliman,
Philippines; “Mapping LGBT Discourse in Italy,” Cate Fugazzola, University of
Chicago; and “To Celebrate Diversity between the West and Asian: the Desire of
Tokyo Rainbow Pride,” Kyohei Itakura, UC Davis. DeGuzman explored BPO call
centers in Philippines and how lesbians working in them coped with their sexuality
in a seemingly but not actually inclusive work environment. For instance, she discussed
common microaggressions. Being asked, for example, “Who’s the guy in the
relationship?” or “Were you ever raped?” Fugazzola discussed her research—using
regional newspapers and how they portrayed events or people related to LGBT—on the LGBT movement in
Italy. Some of her findings show that these newspapers did not acknowledge the
LGBT community as a community but instead as individuals with no sense of
community. Moreover, male politicians who come out as gays are labeled with
feminine adjectives, whereas Paola Concia, a female politician who came out as
a lesbian received more honorary and respectful adjectives—perhaps because she was perceived
as less like a woman and more like a man. Lastly, Itakura explored the Tokyo
Rainbow Pride (TRP) website in its Japanese and English translated version and
the differing agendas and messages of the two websites. By examining the homonationalist
rhetoric of the Japanese website, he demonstrated that TRP seeks to be the
bridge between Western queer culture and the rest of Asia, thereby idealizing
competition.

Although
I only attended two sessions, my expression at QGrad made me realize the true
intersectionality of queer studies. Circling back to the question—can we exist without
borders?—from Gaspar de Alba’s opening remarks, I believe the diversity of the
conference itself provided the answer. Looking at the identity of queer in the
past, present, and future not only in the U.S but in various countries, I felt
that borders do exist whether it is national borders, borders of personal
interest, or borders of language. However, as presenters of different research
interests came together on this day under the very large idea of queerness,
perhaps borders can be transformed into spaces that create powerful interaction
(like this conference) and agency rather than boundaries that section people
off and enforce hierarchies of power.

--
Min Joo Lee is a doctoral student in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA.